Delmar Allen "Dale" Hawkins was a pioneer American rock singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist who was often called the architect of swamp rock boogie.Fellow rockabilly pioneer Ronnie Hawkins was his cousin.

Although often overlooked, Dale Hawkins's contributions are as valid as any of rock 'n' roll's founding fathers. Best known for his 1957 hit "Suzie Q," Hawkins made his reputation as one of two white artists on the Chicago-based Checker label (a Chess subsidiary). A key to his sound has been his ability to discover and develop great guitarists such as James Burton, Roy Buchanan, Kenny Paulsen, and Carl Adams. When his own recording career petered out in the early 1960s, he became a respected producer, cutting hits for John Fred, Joe Stampley & the Uniques, Bruce Channel, the Five Americans and many others.

Hawkins was born on a racially mixed plantation in Goldmine, Louisiana. "Heck, man, I picked cotton until I was 13, 14 years old," Hawkins told Original Cool. "Comin' up from school you'd get a biscuit, stick your finger in it and pour some syrup in and head for the field! That's how it was." With his hard-drinking musician father constantly on the road with various country bands and his mother working full time, Dale and his brother Jerry were essentially raised by their grandparents.

"I don't think I would have had the background of hearing all types of music that I heard if it weren't for my grandfather," recalled Hawkins. "He was a sheriff of some of the parishes over there in Louisiana and I got to go with him sometimes on Saturday night." During these forays with his grandfather, the youngster heard rural country music and gut-bucket blues, sometimes in the same place. "You'd get to hear Elmore James in the back and Hank Williams in the front. Also, we all had to go to church.... They had a Pentecostal church just down the street and I loved to hear 'em play and sing.... I got to go up and sing with 'em sometimes."

Among his other early influences, Hawkins names Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Lonnie Johnson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Encouraged by a local school principal/minister named Professor Lyles, Hawkins sold Grit newspapers and earned enough money to buy his first guitar at age seven. Using a Wayne Raney/Lonnie Glauson harmonica code book, he learned the rudiments of the blues.

A troubled teenager who frequently ran away from home, Hawkins enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the age of 16. "I forged my birth certificate and went in 1953 and got out in 1955," Hawkins reported. "We were poor ... and it was just something I could get into where I could have a paycheck and try to learn something." Upon discharge, he began playing music with professional intentions.

Once out of the military, Hawkins formed a small combo with young guitar phenom James Burton and drummer A. J. Tuminello. Often, the young men would ride their bicycles to gigs at the It'll Do Club on the Bossier strip. The singer's big break came via a clerking job at Stan's Record Shop in Shreveport, where his knowledge of the latest rhythm & blues records came in handy. "I was able to work there because I knew the music and a lot of the people who came in didn't know the title of the song," remembered Hawkins. "So, I'd say, 'Sing me a little bit of it.' I'd know the song immediately and I'd get it for 'em."

Store owner Stan Lewis would prove to be a significant figure in Hawkins's future. Not only was his shop an important R&B record outlet, but the savvy businessman had connections to labels that were a key part of the burgeoning rock 'n' roll movement. Later, Hawkins would rue trusting all the business matters to Lewis, but he admitted in Original Cool that, "For a while there, Stan was a real help to me, until I realized ... that I had signed everything I had away."

Hawkins learned about production in the KWKH studios by helping Merle Kilgore and Johnny Horton master demos for the latter's future country hits "(I'm a) Honky-Tonk Man" and "Whispering Pines." Another friend, Bobby Charles, had just scored a good-sized hit with an R&B jumper, "See You Later, Alligator," which Bill Haley covered to greater acclaim. Impressed, Hawkins crafted his own tune in the same style, called "See You Soon, Baboon," and recorded it at KWKH. Lewis shopped the demo to Charles's label, Chess, and soon the record was released on their Checker subsidiary. Of his authentic bluesy sound Hawkins says, "I think the reason Leonard and Phil Chess signed me was because they thought I was black."

With a snarling James Burton guitar riff modeled roughly on Scotty Moore's work with Elvis Presley and an insistent cowbell provided by drummer A. J. Tuminello, "Suzie Q" was a far greater record than its predecessor. Yet, for reasons still unclear, Leonard Chess didn't release the disc immediately. Hawkins credits Shreveport disc-jockey Chuck Dunaway with helping Chess see the light. "I had sat there for three months waiting for 'em to put it out and [Dunaway] said, 'Dale, let's just send it up to [Jerry] Wexler.' We sent a copy up to Atlantic and a few days later Jerry called and said, 'I love it. I'll take it.' Then I explained to him, 'Mr Wexler, Mr. Chess has got the thing and he hasn't released it. I had signed the papers with him.' He said, 'What? You call him and tell him that he should either sh** or get off the pot.' 'You want me to say it just like that?' He said, 'That's all you got to say.' I called Mr. Chess and told him that. There was a little pause--and to hear Leonard pause during a conversation was something to talk about--and he said, 'I'll call you back tomorrow.' Three days later, it was on the street. That's how fast it worked."

"Suzie Q" was a far bigger seller than its number 27 chart ranking suggests. Employing a rolling marketing strategy, Chess promoted the record vigorously in only one region of the country at a time, a method that affected its national chart status. Although Hawkins wrote the song alone, Stan Lewis and "E. Broadwater" are credited as co-writers. Hawkins explained that "Broadwater" was the maiden name of the wife of Gene Nobles, one of the 1950s' great R&B disc jockeys. By taking a songwriting credit, Nobles was in effect taking payola in the same manner that Alan Freed did when his name was put on Chuck Berry's "Maybellene": the DJs gave the song airplay in return for receiving royalties. Shortly before his death, Nobles assigned his share back to Hawkins. Lewis was another matter. "He said that I sold him 'Suzie Q' for $125 and he was taking half of everything I made. It's bull. All you gotta say is: The man has never written a line of a song that I have ever had. But his signature, he wrote good."

As a result, when the song was successfully revived by Creedence Clearwater Revival as a million-seller in 1968, Hawkins only received BMI checks for airplay. "They couldn't take BMI away from me," explained Hawkins. "In fact, the contract I had with BMI made them my legal guardian and they wouldn't let them take it away from me. So, I get my BMI rights for the airplay. For the sales, I've never received a dime."

Hawkins's work at Checker veered between brilliant blues-with-a-beat excursions like "My Babe," "Tornado," "Wild, Wild World," "La-Do-Dada," and "Don't Treat Me This Way," to such white teen-pop tunes as "A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring" and "Class Cutter (Yeah, Yeah)." Splitting the recording locations between Chicago and Louisiana, Hawkins essentially produced most of his best records during that period.

Hawkins also proved himself adept at finding remarkable guitarists whose work would impact the world of rock for decades to come. James Burton and bassist Joe Osborne went on to enliven recordings by Bob Luman, Ricky Nelson, and Elvis Presley, among many others. Roy Buchanan, who played for Hawkins's first cousin Ronnie for a spell, became the standard for rock and blues guitar during the early 1970s. Kenny Paulsen's twangy riffs transformed Freddie Cannon's "Tallahassee Lassie" and many others into first-rate rockers.

Of all the guitar-slingers he worked with, Hawkins has the greatest appreciation for the lesser known Carl Adams, who can be heard on "Tornado" and "Little Pig." Adams, who later had the fingers blown off of his left hand, played with a searing technique; according to Hawkins, "Roy [Buchanan] learned an awful lot from Carl."

Hawkins asked for his release from Chess in 1960 and recorded singles for such labels as Atlantic, Zonk, Tilt, ABC-Paramount, and Lincoln, and he recorded a live twist album for Roulette. He also produced three singles on the Ebb label for his brother Jerry and hosted his own variety show on a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia. By 1964, however, he was back working for Stan Lewis at his new label, Paula Records.

"My wife was pregnant," Hawkins explained. "I could've stayed in New York and worked for Jerry Wexler, but I thought I needed to go home and do something in the way I was raised. What happened was, I found out that I could only do two things--one of 'em was produce, and the other was sell insurance.... So, yeah, I ended up working for him again and I signed two great artists for him--that was [Joe] Stampley and John Fred."

Stampley, who became one of the top-selling country artists of the 1970s and early 1980s, made his chart debut with a blue-eyed soul outfit called the Uniques. Asked if he remembered recording Stampley's first hit, Hawkins laughs, "I guess so, I wrote a hot check to record him.... Stan Lewis wouldn't give me my money and I had to go hustle it up. I finally got that money back. I pressed up 500 copies, 400 for sale and 100 for the deejays, then I sold the DJ copies out the back of the store. But all the disc jockeys and promotion people liked me a lot, man. I left Shreveport and I hit Vicksburg, Monroe, bam bam bam all the way to Atlanta, and by the time I got back to New Orleans that [record] was a hit. It was a song called 'Not Too Long Ago.' I don't know how high on the charts it went, but it was about a 700,000 seller, which was a pretty good record at that time, man. Then, old Joe just took it on from there!"

By far, Hawkins's biggest success at Paula was his behind-the-scenes work on John Fred's "Judy in Disguise," which became a number one hit in 1967. This monster smash led to a much more lucrative position as an executive vice-president at Abnak Records, which housed the Amy, Mala, and Bell labels. In addition to signing acts, he produced the Five Americans' "Western Union" and his own rock 'n' soul album, L.A., Memphis, and Tyler, Texas. It would be his last album of original material for 30 years.

When Abnak was sold in 1970, Hawkins moved to Los Angeles and became the A&R (Artists & Repertoire) director of RCA's West Coast division. Under his guidance, such hits as Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'" and Michael Nesmith's "Joanne" were cut. Seemingly, Hawkins's career was in full swing, but his reliance on hard liquor and amphetamines was sabotaging his personal and professional career.

"In 1981, I had a decision to make: Are you going to live or die?" he told Gerry Galipault of the Pause & Play website. "When I started out in 1954 or 1955, nobody knew it was wrong ... because it was legal. Everything I got easy, I had never done street drugs in my life. All of a sudden it got to where I could hardly function without them, and so I left the [West Coast] and came back to Louisiana. Even though I left the good money as a producer, I left to save myself."

After completing an extremely difficult year-long rehab program, Hawkins started his own crisis intervention program for teens in Louisiana, a program he kept going for five years. Having balanced some of his ethical books, the reformed singer-songwriter got the itch to make music again, and the post-Elvis rockabilly revival welcomed him with open arms. A surprise windfall of $63,000 from MCA, which had bought the Chess catalog, resulted in Hawkins's having the wherewithal to set up his own Hawk's Nest studio in 1995. Since then, he has eased back into the limelight, playing to appreciative rockabilly revival crowds and, in 1999, recording a well-regarded comeback album for the now defunct Mystic label.

Asked what advice he had for young musicians aspiring to do his type of music, Hawkins is adamant. "Study the masters, man. Don't listen to the historians. Grab the roots and see how it evolved and know what's real.... I don't really see where you could replace spirit with a piece of equipment."

In 2005, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and began chemotherapy while continuing to perform in the US and abroad. In October 2007, The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame honored Dale Hawkins for his contributions to Louisiana music by inducting him into The Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame.
At the same time, he released his latest recording, "Back Down to Louisiana," inspired by a trip to his childhood home. It was recognized by the UK's music magazine, Mojo, as #10 in the Americana category in their 2007 Best of issue, while "LA, Memphis and Tyler, Texas," was awarded #8 in the reissue category.

Hawkins died on February 13, 2010, from colon cancer in Little Rock, Arkansas.